Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

This paper was written for a commemorative Conference
in honour of Robert Gosling OBE (1920-2000), held at the Tavistock Clinic
in February 2001. The title of the Conference, ‘Group and Institutional
Processes at Work,’ made reference to Gosling’s lifelong interest in
and engagement with this field of work. Trained as a psychiatrist and
later as a psychoanalyst, Gosling joined the Tavistock Clinic as a senior
registrar in the 1950s. For several years, he worked as an assistant to
Michael Balint in his pioneering approach to training for general
practitioners. He became a familiar staff member of the programme of Group
Relations Conferences led by Ken Rice and later Eric Miller at Leicester
and elsewhere, without ever losing a quiet but sustained independence of
mind. From 1968-1979 he led the Tavistock Clinic, as Chair of its
Professional Committee, during a period of significant expansion, both in
the extent and range of the Clinic’s work. When his hearing began to
fail, he decided to take early retirement from the NHS and pursue new
paths as craftsman and part time farmer. But he continued to keep in touch
with colleagues and friends working within the Tavistock tradition. He was
a major supporter of the Bridge Foundation in Bristol and retained to the
end a lively and generous interest in the work and development of a new
generation.

In his practice and occasional publications, Gosling
drew on, without drawing attention to, many strands of his experience and
training: on early personal experiences of prolonged illness and
hospitalisation, on his own analysis with Wilfred Bion, the collaboration
with Michael Balint and with colleagues at both the Tavistock Clinic and
the Tavistock Institute, but also on his direct experience of engagement
in many areas of organisational and social life, as participant,
consultant, colleague and leader.

In preparing this paper, I was asked to focus on
Gosling’s published contributions to the field. I found it impossible to
do this without at the same time recalling and trying to convey something
of my experience of the person behind the words. This is where I start
from.

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I first came across Bob Gosling in the early 60s. I had
quite recently arrived at the Tavistock Institute hot foot from the
Psychology department in Cambridge to start, as I thought, on some kind of
a career as a social psychologist. (The very term now seems to date one.)
Social psychology had been my passion at Cambridge, I think because it was
the one branch of the subject that seemed to have any political relevance.
And politics – of the left wing variety – were my extra-curricular
passion at the time.

Social psychology, along with psychoanalysis, and most
other aspects of the subject that didn’t involve rats, monkeys or
pigeons (I exaggerate a little) was not taught then in the Psychology
Department. You had to mug up on it for yourself. My tutor, a
distinguished American physiological psychologist, Larry Weiskrantz, was
sympathetic, but not especially encouraging. He had known a guy called
Alex Bavelas, who was doing experimental studies with groups in the States
and suggested I tried to contact him.

I read all I could but was rather put off by the
numerology. Nevertheless, I eventually decided to apply for a Fulbourn
Scholarship, ostensibly to carry out research into experimental juries. I
recall that in my application I apparently spelled ‘belief’ wrong
throughout and one of my referees had to write to the Selection Committee
to say that I really was a little more intelligent than this might
suggest. Perhaps it was an unconscious expression of my ambivalence. At
any rate, on learning I had been successful I immediately began to have
second thoughts. So I approached my professor for advice.

My professor was Oliver Zangwill, also something of a
physiological psychologist, but a highly cultured man (the son of a
distinguished Viennese novelist), who often gave the impression himself of
feeling he had got caught in an experimental cul de sac. He was studiously
lukewarm about the jury idea and told me bluntly but kindly that if social
psychology was really my passion there was only one man in one place it
was worth speaking to. And that was Eric Trist at the Tavistock Institute
of Human Relations.

I went to see Eric Trist, in a rather dingy room at the
top of the Tavistock Clinic’s building in Beaumont Street. Four months
later I returned to the building as a raw, opinionated graduate, to start
an apprenticeship as a junior Project Officer within the Institute’s
action research programme on socio-technical systems: specifically the
impact of automation on work structures in manufacturing industry.

It was a fateful step. In those days the links between
the Institute and the Clinic were still intimate, both socially and
professionally. As new recruits we were encouraged to explore as much of
what went on in the building as we could steal time for: attending case
conferences, observing groups through the one way screen, going to as many
scientific meetings as we could fit in and most of all through hanging
around the coffee room and bar in the basement of Beaumont Street (later
Devonshire Street) listening in to the elders’ chat.

For an Oxbridge graduate, trained to be skeptical, in
love with words and emotionally naïve, it was at the same time
exhilarating and unsettling. What was all this stuff about objects and
inner worlds and the significance of a child’s play with marbles? Did
people really believe, could they really make sense of what an ex-military
man, with all manner of initials after his name, but who insistently and
irritatingly disclaimed all expertise, had to say about Experiences in
Groups?

Three or four years later I was lucky enough to be
given an opportunity to find an answer to the second of these questions
for myself (it took me another 3 or 4 years to take the opportunity to
find answers to the first.). In the mid-60s, Ken Rice mounted a Group
Relations Conference at the Tavistock that was spread over four months. We
met once a week in the evenings for small groups, lectures and application
seminars. There were also two inter-group events held at weekends. Ken had
managed to engineer a coup and persuade Wilfred Bion back to take one of
the small groups.

By this time the Institute, for reasons the younger
staff had difficulty following, had split into 2 groups, labeled
respectively, A and B. One (I think ‘A’) was led by Eric Trist; one (I
think ‘B’) by Ken Rice. I belonged to A. Relations between the two
groups were somewhat frowned upon. I approached Eric. Would it be OK if I
applied for Ken’s conference? Perhaps a little reluctantly, he said “Yes,
of course”. So a couple of months or so later I sat in a circle with
about 10 colleagues waiting abortively for “Dr. Bion” to start. The
unsettling feelings of the early months at Beaumont Street redoubled - but
with an unexpected twist. Some of us, without necessarily grasping a very
enigmatic text, had read Experiences in Groups. We fully expected, if not
to hear about, at least to get some glimmer of understanding of group
mentality, and in particular the hidden life of basic assumptions
(dependence, fight/flight and pairing.)

Bion never gave the slightest indication of having read
this book. We were at sea twice over. He had apparently ‘moved on’! We
were left behind, without ever really knowing what was the behind
he had left and we hadn’t.

By the time it came to the first Inter Group event some
of us were in a very rebellious mood. Bob Gosling was on the staff for
this event. I recall Ken Rice introducing it, surrounded by his
colleagues, and inviting us to form groups of our choice and kick off.
Staff would be available for consultancy on request and the task was to
explore or study relations between the groups that were formed. Within 3
minutes, according to Ken, there was no-one remaining in the room. We had
all fled into separate groups, apparently at random.

I found myself upstairs, on the second floor of the
Institute’s new building in Devonshire Street, with about 8 mates. We
immediately agreed we had no intention to ask for consultancy and would
manage ourselves. For one and a half days we remained firmly stuck in the
room, sending no one out and smugly waiting for others to come to us. For
a while this seemed to work but the visitors tailed off and we were left
sadly adrift. Towards the last afternoon we panicked, requested a
consultant and got Bob.

I cannot recall now what in detail he may have said.
Except that, whatever it was, it seemed to face us with our fear of what
was outside and our fear for what was inside. To move out was to
move on. But to move on was to risk dismantling something: the illusion or
fantasy that we knew who we were, what we represented, stood for, believed
in: the nature and quality of our (inevitably precarious) attachments.
Moving on implied a readiness not to know. We were not ready not to know
because we were so uncertain about what it was that we did know.

This memory came flooding back to me as I embarked on
reading through Bob Gosling’s all too rare published articles (17
records were found) in preparation for this conference and turned up a
number of letters we had exchanged in the intervening years. There were
other memories also: of listening to Bob lecturing; of discussions in
which he had taken part, and of being a member of I think the first Very
Small Study Group to be mounted at a Leicester Conference, for which Bob
had been the consultant.

I began to see this first memory and its reference to
‘moving on’ as somehow central both to my experience of the man and to
my reading of his work (literally and metaphorically).

It is this notion of “moving on”, as presented in
the person and the work that I want to try and capture. Not just as a
personal tribute but because I think it has an abiding relevance to the
state of the field; to the ways in which we experience and think about
group and institutional processes and our engagement with them at the
present time.

There is a colloquialism we sometimes use, “movers
and shakers”, implying that the two are one and the same; or at least
that they go together as in love and marriage/horse and carriage. I don’t
think this is exactly the case. Shakers tend to turn the world upside
down, including often the world they were previously in themselves. They
move from A to B (or A to Z) in a disconcerting way, which leaves us
wondering and puzzling about how they got there. Bion was perhaps
something of a shaker, which is why he could be so extra-ordinarily
unsettling. Bob Gosling was not a shaker, in this sense. He always worked
within a recognisable and in some ways familiar frame of reference,
conceptual, methodological and institutional, although these frames of
reference were themselves often the new found products of shakers: Freud,
Klein, Bion and collectively the group of psychiatrists, psychologists and
social scientists who between them re-invented the Tavistock Clinic after
the Second World War.

But he was certainly a mover. In that he never rested in the familiar: was always testing it against his experience, as a
clinician, consultant, teacher, leader and not only questioning what he
knew but encouraging or joining with others to do the same.

Perhaps the clearest example of this refusal to rest
content is afforded in a paper written for a memorial festschrift for
Wilfred Bion on his experiences with Very Small Groups (Gosling 1981).
(The VSG was a group of 5 or so members, meeting with a consultant in the
context of a residential Group Relations conference, with the aim of
studying their behaviour as it happened, as the formula goes in the ‘here
and now’).

The rationale behind setting up these groups was the
realisation that many members coming to these conferences spent much of
their working lives engaged in groups of 5 or so people, rather than the
groups of 10 or so that conventionally define the boundary of small groups
in conferences, let alone the large group made up of all the members. It
was assumed that in such smaller groupings a different range or colouring
of dynamics might come into view.

The institution of such groups could, of course, itself
be seen as an example of moving on. And indeed Bob’s description of his
experiences and his characterisation of the psychological field opened up
in this setting, broke new ground: in particular in his drawing attention
to the problem of intimacy as “an impending danger that must always be
guarded against”, a problem which seemed to put limitations on what
could take place, draining energy in a way that could lead members to miss
what one described as “the power politics of the small group and all the
attendant archaic and crazy events.”

It is not, however, this aspect of the paper I want to
draw attention to. Having sketched his tentative observations from his
first two experiences in taking these groups, Bob goes on to describe a
third. This is how he puts it.

“No sooner had these thoughts of mine got to the
stage of being expressed than I was confronted with the experience of yet
another VSG to which what I thought I had learned so far seemed to have
only the vaguest relevance. This was a VSG experience in 1977 provided for
members of a Training Group numbering 13 in conjunction with a Working
Conference membership of 45 and a Conference Staff Group of 12. Training
Group members had each had experience of being a member of a Working
Conference on at least two occasions before.

The aim of the Training Group was to provide them with
the experience of assuming the role of consultant to groups of Working
Conference members later in the conference. In this setting the two VSG’s,
one of six members and the other of seven members, remained firmly
sub-groups of the 14; it was the Training Group as a whole that held the
predominant sentience.

There was much nostalgia for the raw experiences of the
SG’s of yester-year, there was some pressure to demonstrate expertise in
identifying some small group phenomena that had become familiar; notions
of “doing things on behalf of the group” were so quickly mobilized and
so firmly ensconced in the orthodox jargon of the group that there was
little room left for testing things out in the light of members’
personal experience. For my part I had, by accepting a staff role in
relation to the Training Group, come to put a premium on the fact that I
had worked in two VSG’s before and so was more “experienced” than
most others. I was constantly hoping that some of the psychological models
that had seemed to be fruitful in the past would turn out to be so again.
It is unclear how much time was wasted by us all trying to recreate
circumstances that would have vindicated the idea that we all had “experience.”
In fact the salient affective issues in the VSG were of a depressive kind,
in particular how one is one’s own most dangerous saboteur and how one’s
public stance on the side of learning turns out to be a determination to
repeat what one already knows and to learn as little that is new as
possible. This experience left me with two vivid realisations:

1. How much the events I was trying to get to grips
with were defined, predicated or determined by their social context
and therefore how empty of meaning it was to refer to VSG’s, SG’s
or LG’s as if they were reproducible objects or even that there was
such an identifiable category as what I have heard referred to as “conference
learning.” The initials VSG refer to events that have a certain
amount in common, such as number of participants and the fact that
they take place in a tradition of exploration called the Leicester
Conference, but that are profoundly influenced by what is going on
round them in time and place. So much is this the case that any
generalization about VSG’s that can fairly be made is likely to be
so modest as to be of very little use or interest.

2. How quickly a formulation, a concept or a theory
loses its enabling quality and becomes a barrier to the possibility of
making further observations. An experience of a VSG is deepened or led
on to a further and new experience only at the moment that a theory
about it is being fashioned. The theory may then lie around for a
while to be applied occasionally and enjoyed in a way that is neither
productive nor harmful. Sooner or later, however, it becomes a barrier
to new experiences, a Procrustean bed and a downright blight.
Psychoanalytic practice is also replete with this phenomenon. Perhaps
the most that can be hoped for is that this cycle of degeneration, if
there is one, is accomplished in asshort a time as possible,”(Gosling
1981).

I do not think these subversive observations have ever been given the
full attention they merit.

- The relativity of psychological events to a social context;

- the danger of generalizing across such contexts;

- the tendency to re-ify objects (VSG, SG, LG but
also perhaps psycho-analysis,

- group relations, open systems); and

- the paradox of learning, that the moment of formulation – the
emergence of a

model or theory, simultaneously deepens experience and becomes a
barrier to

new experience, have seldom been more clearly and simply
expressed.

I think that, for Bob Gosling, all experiential
learning, whatever its setting - the psycho-analytic encounter, group
relations events, Balint groups, came to be felt by him as taking on a
necessarily provisional cast, in which every formulation or theory was for
the time being or rather for the present time, time now;
simultaneously a point of arrival and a point of departure: from which one
had to find the courage to move on.

In an earlier paper than the one I have cited, also I
think sadly neglected, Bob drew on Winnicott’s account of transitional
phenomena in early childhood to offer a new perspective on the
difficulties involved in this movement on. The paper is titled ‘Another
source of conservatism in groups,’(Gosling 1978). Its focus is on what
he terms “resistance to change in the face of good reason.” In it he
reviews two familiar sources of such resistance that psychodynamic studies
have focused on:

- reluctance to give up established relationships, reviving internal
experiences of loss, and linked to this

- fear of the unknown, experienced as a realm populated by, as he
characteristically puts it (avoiding jargon) “all sorts of
hobgoblins and foul fiends.”

But he then makes an unexpected move. Drawing on
Winnicott’s descriptions of transitional phenomena in children’s play,
he suggests that all or at least most groups, be they “families, teams,
working gangs, committee meetings, therapy groups etc.” create or come
to inhabit a transitional zone or space in which the boundary between
reality and illusion, objective and subjective worlds is held in abeyance,
allowing for paradox, inconsistency, the play of ideas, the emergence of
myths at however rudimentary a level. As he puts it “it is as if a group
soon develops along with its customary ability to recognize some hard
facts for what they are, a similar capacity for indulging illusions and
living along with inconsistencies and paradoxes to say nothing of
downright lies.”

It is this feature of group life that partly accounts,
he suggests, for the value we can come to place on group membership. “In
one’s group one is again allowed to be opinionated, inconsistent,
inconsequential and downright nonsensical. Here some indulgence of
illusions is taken for granted and the place is strewn with paradoxes.
Whether or not the group is engaged in an explicitly avowed common task,
such a group has high sentience for its members.

If this is the case, it would not be the least
surprising if people clung on to groups that they know either as to
membership or as to structure or as to both. For only in such a company
where “assumptions” are for the time being accepted as “facts”
will the individual feel he has some sanction for his “omnipotence”
and so be able to gain some faith in what he is dreaming about but what he
has not yet been able to find in the shared world of objective experience.
For this chance to be playful with fellow members of a group and for this
reminder of how imagination was first led on by a playful mother, group
membership may sometimes be stuck to through thick and thin, and all
efforts to change its culture resisted to the death.”

On this view, the problem of change is that it involves
decision, a choice between alternatives: a but not b; an either/or which
dissolves or cannot allow for contradictions. “Action is felt as “one
for all” and as a death to the as yet unconceived alternative. At this
threat conservation rears its noble or ugly head.”

I want to suggest this. All real learning takes place
within a transitional space. But the moment of learning dissolves that
space, through an act of exclusion. The difficulty is that the evolution,
in the individual or the group, brought about by this moment and this act,
gets re-incorporated in ones repertoire of response: a kind of so far and
no further, which in turn resists the burden of future experience.
Learning and resistance to learning are endless. That is our existential
dilemma as learning animals. Or, as Bob expressed this elsewhere “it is
as if learning always has to take place at the edge of exasperation”.

I think, though, that it is important to make the point
that this is not to be regretted. One other characteristic of Bob Gosling
to my mind was the way in which he seemed as it were to sit loose to
psychopathology. One might think of this as a kind of charitableness, born
of and from his own more personal experiences and awareness. After all,
much of what we may deem pathological is but a heightening or distortion
of developmental truths about the human condition: a point it seems to me
made quite explicit in the work of Melanie Klein.

So, for example, in an unpublished late paper on the
‘Everyday Work Group,’ (Gosling 1994) Bob sought to rescue Basic
Assumptions from the suggestion, sometimes implicit amongst Group
Relations practitioners, that they are in some way an unfortunate, archaic
hangover from our inheritance as a group species. Without basic
assumptions, he suggests, we could not negotiate many of the challenges
presented by working life. This was not to deny the conflicts there can be
between basic assumption mentality and work group functioning. Rather it
was to make the point that the focus on this conflictual element might
tell us more about the matrix of psycho-analytic ideas and methods from
which they sprang, with its emphasis on mobilizing and probing tension and
conflict, than about the realities of our reflected experiences of their
presence in group life.

So too in the paper I have just cited, Bob sees the
transitional territory groups may inhabit as a potential and not just a
constraint. So, having characterised the transitional state of mind in
groups he goes on to say this:

“As people who are often called upon to operate in
groups, whether committee meetings, clinical teams, seminars, therapy
groups or what have you, I suggest it is of some importance for us to
consider what opportunities for playfulness a group offers, what are the
limits that are appropriate and how are the opportunities for imaginative
innovation set up. According to the task in hand the constraints on
playfulness may be too great or not great enough, the former resulting in
a stilted and sterile group that produces only what its leader already has
in mind; and the latter, through its disregard of common reality resulting
in an omnipotence that expands beyond the boundary of the task and that
provokes various kinds of acting out.”

I have not time to describe the three illustrations he
uses to expand on this point. But I think he is here exploring territory
which has great relevance to the organisational worlds we are now
inhabiting. So, for example, it could, I think, be said across much of the
public sector, that the externally driven preoccupation with detailed and
intrusive target setting, quality assurance, clinical governance and risk
management, is squeezing out not only the space for professional judgment,
but also for the exercise of the kind of unfettered, messy, sometimes
playful, sometimes conflictual imaginative interchange underlying all
human creativity, either as individuals or groups.

On the other hand in the private sector, perhaps, the
saga of the E.com companies illustrates what may happen when the absence
of constraints is not great enough and omnipotence extends beyond the
boundaries of the task. Though, even here, we should perhaps be chary of
dismissing such experiments as simply illusory, rather than, say, the
first, faltering ventures of a revolution.

I have tried to describe something of what has emerged
for me in preparing for this memorial paper: the spirit of movement and
the reflections born from it that I felt I was picking up in memory and
from the words on the page; and their abiding professional challenge to
us, certainly to myself.

Before closing I want to say something that it has
occurred to me may have helped and served to inform the particular
emphases I have picked out from Bob Gosling’s work. There may have been
more personal elements, also, but they are not available to me. There are
two aspects I want to comment on: the range and variability of Bob Gosling’s
professional activities and interests and the constancy of a certain
mental practice.

Bob trained as a psychiatrist and a psycho-analyst and
was a distinguished practitioner in those disciplines. But he did not
confine himself to them. The impression I have is that his centre of
interest always lay in what one might think of as applied fields, except
that the language of application does not do justice exactly to what is
involved.

To put this another way, and perhaps this is what
Sebastian Kraemer meant when he described Bob Gosling to me a few days ago
as a “quintessentially Tavistock man”, Bob was always putting his
psycho-analytic knowledge and understanding, including here his knowledge
and understanding of group relations, both to the service and to the test
of engagement with other areas of experience and practice: work with
families, general medical practice, the interaction of students and
teachers, the leadership of professional support groups, the management of
institutions.

He moved himself between such social contexts and I
think it was this moving between that both drew his attention to
and enabled him so clearly to formulate, from his own experience, the
necessity and the difficulty of moving on.

Nonetheless, in this movement between there was also
something held constant, which characterised his practice and surely
reflected something from his psycho-analytic training and experience. In
the chapter he wrote with Pierre Turquet on The Training of General
Practitioners (Gosling and Turquet 1967), which describes the approach
developed by the two of them to working with Balint groups, they state
their objective as follows:

“Our problem is so to conduct a seminar that
there is little or no denying or evading of the emotional welter in
which the GP is living his professional life.”

A little later referring to the role of the group
leader, they say:

“The leader’s aim is to assist the ego’s of
the member to embrace more, to experience more fully the forces
current in their relations with their patients.”

To combine these two images I think it is this stance
of encouraging us, whatever the context we inhabit, to embrace the
emotional welter in which we work and live, that perhaps best sums up Bob’s
enterprise, as it were across the board. Not as something from which he
stood apart but as something in which he was necessarily also implicated
and attuned to. Necessarily, because it is only through being implicated,
through recognizing one’s own implicatedness, that one gets access to
what is happening.

And this enterprise for Bob was not something engaged
in simply for its own sake, but because it made a difference to us,
carried information, intelligence about the worlds of thought and action
we inhabit, and the dilemmas and challenges we face.

For myself and my colleagues, it is an exemplary stance
and one which I believe, if we can be true to it, helps us, with our
clients, to keep on moving on.

References

Gosling, R. (1981) “A Study of Very Small Groups”,
in J.S. Grotstein (ed), Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? A Memorial to Dr
Wilfred Bion, New York: Aaronson

Gosling, R. (1994) “The Everyday Work Group,” in
Burkard Sievers and David Armstrong (eds), Discovering Social Meaning: a
Festschrift for W. Gordon Lawrence on the occasion of his 60th birthday (unpublished)

Gosling, R. and Turquet, P.M. (1967) “The Training of
General Practitioners,” in Gosling, R. et al, The Use of Small Groups in
Training, Codicote Press Ltd in conjunction with the Tavistock Institute
of Medical Psychology